


Before Dawn

by freedomworm



Category: Hamlet - All Media Types, Hamlet - Shakespeare, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: M/M, a man standing on his saddle banged on my shutters and called me a punk ass bitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 05:30:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18204164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freedomworm/pseuds/freedomworm
Summary: Around and around they go.





	Before Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> -Nothing, and i mean NOTHING, gives me more amusement than quoting lines from the movie with the exact inflections of tim roth and gary oldman
> 
> -you don't need to read my other fic to read this, but it might give you an extra kick
> 
> -did not beta and i swear to god i slept at least 5 hours every day this week but it was finals and i am CRASHING somehow even as i type this
> 
> -me@ my brain: thought I was gonna work on my xmen fic, did you? a man stood on his saddle and banged on my shutters and called me bitch
> 
> -lines lifted from the play, but it's all sort of a mix of the play as well as the 1990 movie.

It's shortly before dawn when Guildenstern wakes up, or at least, he assumes this to be the time. It's still pitch black in the room.

It takes Guildenstern a moment to remember: a messenger called them the morning before last. Urgent business. A royal summons. He called them to Elsinore.

( _Them._ )

"Rosencrantz," says Guildenstern, the name bursting into his mind like a sun beam.

There is a weight on the lumpy mattress next to him, and in the dark, Guildenstern sits up a little to see a shadowy lump of a figure under the covers next to him, pressed up against the wall bordering their bed as though he means to pass through it.

Guildenstern reaches out and his hand finds Rosencrantz's shoulder.

He can feel the warmth of Rosencrantz's body through his nightshirt, which ought to come as no surprise, and yet for a moment, fills Guildenstern with intense relief.

He tugs Rosencrantz away from the wall, and though still seemingly asleep, he rolls over amiably and curls in toward Guildenstern, hooking a leg over him and draping his arm across Guildenstern's front.

Guildenstern puts his arm around Ros, and the weight of him by his side feels right. He closes his eyes.

 

 

An awful racket chases Guildenstern upright and awake. He feels Rosencrantz startle, too, but he’s too sleep-addled to question just how tangled their limbs became in the night.

“ROSENCRANTZ! GUILDENSTERN!” comes a shout beyond their shaking door.

A shiver runs through Guildenstern and he yanks a section of the bed sheets around him, uprooting Rosencrantz somehow in the process and sending him tumbling to the floor with a yelp.

Rosencrantz goes to see what the caller wants. It is a messenger, no more than a shadow and a disembodied voice as far as Guildenstern is concerned.

He huddles, paralyzed in place on the bed, but he can hear the messenger reporting his purpose. Urgent matters to attend to, he says. _To Elsinore_.

 

 

“What’s your name?” Guildenstern says.

“What’s _yours_?” says the other one. Rosencrantz.

 _He_ is  Guildenstern. He’s able to hold onto as much fact, but something about the game of questions is exacerbating his constant bemusement, his paranoia.

He has there terrible thought that there was something before this.

Guildenstern walks into the closet area behind the court and  comes out the other doorway, passing through the dark and into the light as anyone could have anticipated. As he ought to have anticipated. “What’s your name when you’re at home?” He demands across the court.

“What’s _yours_?” says Rosencrantz.

“When I’m at home?”

“Is it different at home?”

“What home?”

“Haven’t you got one?”

“Why do you ask?” And if he —if Rosencrantz could just _answer_ , perhaps it would all make sense. The unscratchable itch in Guildenstern's mind would be relieved.

Rosencrantz blinked. “I…”

His hesitation was not what Guildenstern expected. (Not that he expected anything —or maybe, in some small part of his mind, he did. And why was that?)

“What are you driving at?” Rosencrantz says, bewildered.

The moment is gone, surprise eliminated as quickly as it appeared. There is confusion on Rosencrantz’s face.

Guildenstern hates it because he thinks he knows —he knows Rosencrantz has forgotten again. (Forgotten what, exactly? Why was his forgetting so inevitable, so expected despite its absurdity?)

“ _What’s your name_?” Guildenstern says, unable to keep from shouting. He could scream. He wants to cross the floor and grab Rosencrantz by the shoulders. He wants to shake him. (He wants to—)

Rosencrantz’s face lights up, innocently pleased. “Repetition! Two-love. Match point to me.”

Guildenstern does scream, then: “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?”

 

 

He opens his eyes and it is dark, but he knows the other is nearby. He feels his presence like an extension of himself, like instinct.

A light comes on, bright and white, beaming down from an unknown place.

Guildenstern looks over at Rosencrantz. He can’t bring himself to sit up and just lies there, squinting against the light at Rosencrantz. He swallows hard and feels a phantom pain around his neck, the memory of rope burn. “Are we-?”

Rosencrantz stares back at him, eyes wide as ever. “Do you think-?”

“Unlikely,” Guildenstern whispers. It doesn’t make sense—

“And yet,” Rosencrantz replies.

And yet.

Guildenstern is cold. He thinks he is dead, and maybe after everything, after all the feeling of being thrown about, cast adrift against the circumstances of life, this is what finally makes sense. No one expects anything of Guildenstern here, least of all Rosencrantz.

“I’m cold,” Rosencrantz says. “It’s cold.” And he sounds miserable about it.

But Guildenstern finally feels like he can _breathe_ and he refuses to indulge in small discomforts. “Is it?” he says, “I’m not.”

Rosencrantz startles and looks over. “What?”

He frowns. “What?”

“Not what?”

His heart begins to pound. He’s forgotten. He doesn’t know why this upset him, and maybe that means he’s forgotten, too. “Cold,” he says, “I’m not cold.” He sighs. Irritation is quickly coming back to him, infecting him. A welcome distraction. “Where the bloody hell are we?” he finally asks, not particularly of anyone. He closes his eyes. Darkness is a familiar thing, at least.

 

 

“There must have been a moment,” he says. He can see it all now, like his entire life flashing before his eyes.

(But it’s not his _entire_ life. He thinks he must have had a mother, a family, but he can’t remember this upbringing. He thinks: _Wittenberg_ , and he knows this is where he and Rosencrantz and Hamlet passed their time in good humor, but the memories are hazy, half-formed. He remembers Rosencrantz more than anything. It’s Rosencrantz who is vivid in his mind, riding beside him, matching his pace perfectly as they walked…)

“At the beginning…” The rope around his neck is heavy on his shoulder. The nooseman ought have pulled it just the bit higher. Or maybe the last person to hang was shorter than he? (But that’s impossible, he thinks. It’s _his_ noose. Shouldn’t it fit?)

“...Where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it.” He means to shrug, but then the weight of the rope is gone. He looks around and sees he is alone. “Rosen-?” He blinks. “Guil-?”

The emptiness meets his words with  dead air. There is nothing out there.

(Guildenstern has spent his entire existence going to England, but he doesn’t think he’s ever been there, not really. He wonders if it’s all a lie, if England was never out there to begin with… And yet. If England is a myth, how can he be about to die?)

He keeps the tremble out of his voice, but his body feels on the verge of shaking apart, his nerves all on end. “Well, we’ll know better next time. Now you...” He stares out and feels the echo of an idea that he ought to say something else. But there’s no one around to hear him deliver these last lines, so he doesn’t.

 

 

He wakes just before dawn and rolls over, reaching out through the night until he finds feels Rosencrantz on the other side of the bed.

The fool is borrowed against the wall again, and Guildenstern peels him away from it with his eyes still closed.

He feels Rosencrantz shift over and loop his arms around him, hugging him close while he can. (Before the messenger comes, he thinks groggily, but he doesn’t know why. What messenger?)

 

 

He’s on the cusp of revelation, he thinks, or at least, he feels that he’s been here before, and that he knows how this all plays out. (He doesn’t, though. He has no idea  what will happen. He can’t remember).

Guildenstern watches Rosencrantz sitting across from him, utterly unvexed by their situation. “ _Are you happy_?” he’d asked.

“ _I suppose so_ ,” Rosencrantz had responded.

“What do you want to do?” Rosencrantz says now, and he is so prepared to simply follow Guildenstern’s lead.

“I have no desires,” Guildenstern says. (This is a lie). He begins to say something else — _there was a messenger_ —but there is a feeling in his mind, a thought erupting from the recesses of his memory. He knows the weight of Rosencrantz in his arms, the feeling of his facial scruff, rough under his palms. He knows the taste of Rosencrantz on his tongue and the exact force of his lips pressing kisses into his skin. (Why does he know this?)

Guildenstern’s breath hitches in his chest. Why does he know this? How can he know this when he barely knows anything else? When he hardly knows himself?

Rosencrantz is watching him now, waiting.

“Guil-?” he begins, and frowns.

“What do you remember?” Guildenstern says. His palms are sweating in his gloves, despite the chilly autumn day. He feels hot around the collar, too. Feverish with new thought. Revelation.

Rosencrantz frowns and his eyes turn upward as he thinks, trying to remember, trying to… His expression finally lights up. “Oh, you mean the the first thing to happen today?” he says.

“No,” Guildenstern says, feeling choked as he does so. The words don’t want to come out of him. He keeps it short.

“I woke up, I suppose,” Rosencrantz continues, as though he hasn’t heard him. “Oh —I’ve got it now —that man, a foreigner, he woke us up—”

 _No no no no no_. He was so close —they were so close— and Guildenstern can feel the moment slipping by — “A messenger,” he says, and it’s easier, but he can’t relax. He must remember —not what Rosencrantz thinks they ought to — _he_ ought to —but the other things. Things Guildenstern doesn’t think he ever expected to remember.

“That’s it,” Rosencrantz is saying, “Pale sky before dawn…”

Before dawn.

( _Waking up just before dawn…_ )

And suddenly everything Rosencrantz is saying, Guildenstern doesn’t just feel but _knows_ he has heard before. He thinks he’s going mad.

“...You remember that —this man woke us up,” Rosencrantz says.

“Yes,” Guildenstern says.

“We were sent for.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why we’re here. Traveling.”

“Yes.” He is getting quieter and quieter with each word and now Guildenstern can do little more than whisper.

Rosencrantz looks around. He is silent for an unexpectedly long stretch of time, squinting around the forest surrounding them. Confusion is rapidly blooming around his expression, but that is not usual. “...M-matter of extreme urgency…” he mumbles, almost absentmindedly, as though reciting parts of a half-memorized script. “...Fearful, lest we… lest we…” His gaze turns on Guildenstern.

And Guildenstern feels a punch of guilt to his very core when he sees the intensity of Rosencrantz’s loss, burning in his eyes.

He did this  —selfishly seized the moment to go beyond —and in doing so he has left Rosencrantz adrift, untethered from even the assumption that they were grappling to recover the same thing, that at least they were out of step together.

Silence falls dead between them.

Eventually, Rosencrantz says something: “I remember,” he says, “A certain darkness. And you.” He stares at a patch of the forest floor in front of him, concentrating.

It’s more than Guildenstern expects. He expects nothing. He—

“I… I thought it would end, then. There was a messenger. And then there wasn’t.”

Guildenstern rocks forward suddenly, getting his feet for just long enough to cross the distance between them and sit beside Rosencrantz. This feels right, suddenly it’s what he’s supposed to do, this time around. (Around what?)

“But we have answers now, don’t you see?” Guildenstern says.

“Questions,”

“No, answers.”

Rosencrantz folds his arms tightly across his chest. He shakes his head. “We’ve got nothing to go on… We’re out on our own.”

“We’re…” The words begin to slip out before Guildenstern can understand what makes him say it. ( _We’re on our way to England_. But that’s not true, is it? They’re on their way to Elsinore — _a royal summons, his very own words: official business and no questions asked_ —)

Guildenstern swallows down the words and puts an arm around Rosencrantz’s shoulder. The touch anchors him and he feels Rosencrantz relax a little, slumping against his side.

“We’ve been here before,” Rosencrantz says softly, dejected.

Guildenstern stiffens. “What do you mean?” More questions. Always more questions. Just when he thought —when it seemed, finally—

Rosencrantz sighs. “I want to go home,” he says.

( _What home_?)

Guildenstern is beginning to have a headache. “Rose—” A beat. He’s breathing hard. He is on the cusp of revelation. There are answers. Answers within grasp. Sense within reaching distance. He only has to ask the right question. (But there are so _many_ questions.)

“What do you remember?” he says for a second time.

Rosencrantz turns and looks at him and he stares for long enough that Guildenstern begins to fear he’s forgotten, that he will blink and his frown will be replaced once more with blissful indifference. It terrifies him. It is essential — _essential_ —that they two should find the point of it all together. They are two sides of the same coin, bound together for all that they know or don’t know.

“We were in a bed,” Rosencrantz says slowly, his arms loosening and one hand reaching out to Guildenstern. He pauses and removes his glove, such that when he slides his hands against Guildenstern’s jaw, cupping his cheek, Guildenstern feels the warmth of skin against his skin.

“I remembered you,” Rosencrantz says, sounding entranced. His hands moves along Guildenstern’s face, fingertips brushing his cheekbone, tracing up around his eye to his brow bone before he finally moves as if to lean way again.

Guildenstern can’t abide by the idea. He catches Rosencrantz’s wrist. “Please,” he says, and _—please_ , what, exactly? He doesn’t quite know, just that these words are new as far as he knows, as far as he can remember.

Rosencrantz comes toward him like he’s falling forward. There is no collision. He kisses Guildenstern, close-mouthed so sweet and gentle it makes Guildenstern _hurt._

Rosencrantz cradles his face with one hand gloved and one ungloved and presses another kiss to Guildenstern’s lips, this time just a little harder, just a little longer. He leans back.

They stare at each other, no words said, eyes crossed slightly by necessity of the short distance between them.

There is something in the distance. The sound of drums. The clamor of a caravan passing by.

Guildenstern doesn’t know who moves first, but then they are kissing again, mouths coming together desperately. He has been here before, fumbling hastily to remove his gloves so he can _feel,_ so he can tangle his fingers in Rosencrantz’s hair and know the texture against his skin.

He knows this. The bite of cold on his fingers is familiar in a distant way, reasonable and logical, even if he can’t summon an exact instance in his blurry memory.

They tip sideways and Guildenstern shifts onto his back, Rosencrantz a solid weight over him and the smell of dirt moist and cold all around them. Dead leaves crunch underneath them everytime they move and it’s the realest thing Guildenstern has ever experienced.

He clutches Rosencrantz’s front, torn between trying to get under his many layers and the knowledge that it will be too cold for them if he does so.

Rosencrantz’s tongue in his mouth is sinful. Deft. Perhaps he remembers this. Perhaps he will.

A strangled sound escapes Guildenstern’s mouth and is quickly swallowed by Rosencrantz, but the sound sets them off and oh _—_ that's it, Guildenstern supposes, half out his mind: maybe this is all they are here _—_ Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, frantically rutting against each other, clinging to each other in every way they can just to make it through the dreadful unknowability of their existence.

 _Well_ , he thinks, _nothing wrong with that_.

Eventually Rosencrantz’s mouth slips off his and panting, Guildenstern stares at the pale blue-grey sky overhead, his breath fogging in the air before him

( _—grey plume of his own breath_ )

 _—_ and Rosencrantz still embracing him tightly, half lying on top of him, face buried against Guildenstern’s collarbone, or rather, in the scarf now too warm around his neck.

He thinks Rosencrantz is saying something, whispering against his body so quiet, he sounds like he's praying.

“What?” Guildenstern asks eventually, speaking up hoarsely.

His hands are growing numb with cold but he doesn't want to move the arm resting over Rosencrantz’s back. His wits are coming back to him now,  and Guildenstern is growing wary of any returning feelings of existential turmoil. He worries that if he moves away from Rosencrantz, he’ll never be able to come back to this feeling, this sense that they’ve found something, that a truth has been discovered.

“What is it?” Guildenstern says again.

Rosencrantz turns his head so that his words will travel unmuffled: “I want to remember. This. Us.”

“It’s different now,” Guildenstern says.

Rosencrantz doesn’t answer for a while.

The sound of the horse hoofs beat nearby. Guildenstern can hear the clang of pots and the creak of a wooden wagon drawing near.

Rosencrantz sits up and looks out across the woods toward the racket. “Let’s see,” he says.

Guildenstern watches him clamber to his feet and go to his horse.

(His mind screams.)

 

 

Dark.

A circle of light.

He lies back, folding his hands behind his head. No anticipation. Finally. “What do you remember?”

“After everything I’ve forgotten?”

“Yes.”

Rosencrantz, sitting beside him, only visible as a shape in Guildenstern’s periphery, takes several seconds to answer. “I remember you,” he says.

( _“I remembered you,” he said, breath clouding the cold air… and “please,” Guildenstern had said…_ )

Guildenstern just nods. “Well of course you do,” he says.

 

 

 

Another time, Rosencrantz peers at him with such a look of concentration, Guildenstern almost feels moved to laugh. “Are you afflicted?”

“I remember,” Rosencrantz says, trying to pull himself up but seeming to forget they’re all tangled together, a knot of limbs and sheets. He babbles, his expression paling slightly with each new word.

A rattling knock on the shutters cuts through the conversation and Rosencrantz grab his arm and kisses him. It’s familiar ground, though if pressed, Guildenstern could not say exactly why.

The knocking continues.

“I remember you, and you remember me,” Rosencrantz says, and that’s true, and it’s always been true.

 

 

He wakes up when he feels a sudden shift on the mattress beneath him.

There’s a whisper in the dark, the tickle of warm again against his shoulder.

“We’ll know better next time,” the other one promises them both. It is night, still, sometime before dawn when even the light of the sun has not come up just yet.

Guildenstern’s eyes slide close again and he holds onto Rosencrantz while he can. Before the messenger comes to call, before they go, before light comes and floods his head with uncertainty.

“ _What do you remember?”_ he wants to ask, but the question slips away deeper and deeper into nothing with each second that he doesn’t ask it. It doesn’t matter.

( _Instinctive_.)

He will always know the answer, even if he forgets the name, even if he forgets everything else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man, standing on his saddle, bangs on the shutters and shouts their names in a certain dawn. He delivers a message, a summons. A matter of extreme urgency.

 


End file.
